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The face recognition module runs on images captured from a pan-tilt-zoom camera facing the door to the smart room.
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We present the Connector, a context-aware service that intelligently connects people. It maintains an awareness of its users' activities, preoccupations and social relationships to mediate a proper connection at the right time between them. In addition to providing users with important contextual cues about the availability of potential callees, th...
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Citations
... Context-awareness in the smart environment collects context data using the sensors of installed devices to provide services to users. For example, Danninger et al. 10 proposed a method for managing meeting room and schedule. Paganelli and Giuli 11 presented the ontology for elderly people at home, such as patient state, home state, and emergency alarm. ...
Recently, the concept of Internet of Things has widely proliferated to offer advanced connectivity between devices, systems, and services that continuously obtain enormous amounts of data from sensors. Recognizing context from the sensor data plays a crucial role in adding value to the raw sensor data. In this article, we propose a context-aware system through device-oriented modeling for the Internet of Things using modular Bayesian networks based on our previous study. A Bayesian network can handle flexibly the uncertain environments of frequent changes in device configuration, and the proposed system can enable us to adjust to the changing Internet of Things environment, making it more flexible. The main contribution of the article lies in the realization of the modular context-aware system with device-oriented modeling of Bayesian networks in smart home and the verification of the usability through a subjective test with 116 people. In addition, we evaluate the performance of the proposed system and show the reduction of time complexity using the real data. Compared to other methods such as decision tree and monolithic Bayesian network, the performance improvement is statistically significant according to t-test.
... ContextPhone [9] is a mobile platform built to enable context-aware technology such as the ContextContacts application that lets users represent and exchange presence information with their mobile device contacts. The Connector application [6] uses a series of sensors and techniques for sophisticated context detection in order to intelligently connect people. More recently, the Friendlee application by HP Labs [3] uses call records and contextual data to infer the user's immediate social network, before reordering the device contacts accordingly. ...
Mobile context-awareness is a popular research trend in the field in ubiquitous computing. Advances in mobile device sensory hardware and the rise of 'virtual' sensors such as web APIs mean that the mobile user is exposed to a vast range of data that can be used for new advanced applications. This workshop allows industrial and academic researchers to present work focusing on novel methods of context acquisition in the mobile environment - particularly through the use of physical and virtual sensors - along with research into new applications utilising this context. In addition, the workshop will encourage insights, into the technical and usability challenges in mobile context-awareness, as well as observations on current and future trends in the field.
... In order to describe the complex behavior of the Connector Service, we consider a sample scenario described in detail in [9]. In this scenario a meeting is scheduled in a CHIL smart room, where most of the meeting participants are already present. ...
Multi-agent software architectures have gained in popularity due to their beneficial behavior in designing and implementing sophisticated applications. However, current approaches in implementing such architectures have led to application-specific, non-scalable implementations which limit the reusablity and improvement of the whole architecture. Moreover, these attempts lack features to enhance the user experience, thus slowing the adoption of the resulting services. In this paper we describe a fully-fledged multi-agent architecture covering a large variety of preferred features including capabilities of ‘plugging’ ubiquitous services, servicing mobile users, interconnecting remote similar architectures and interfacing with advanced software components such as knowledge bases. This framework exploits a wide-range of context-aware components making it essentially context-aware, allowing for the development of ubiquitous context-aware human-centric services, which are the focus of our research. To illustrate the flexibility of this architectural framework, we present four services which were built using this architectural paradigm by different development teams and elaborate on their overall behavior.
... Although the presented system has, to the authors' best knowledge, no direct analogs, some of the recently reported design solutions would be used to enhance the proposed service concept and facilitate the social space reconstruction. Specifically, to improve the currently deployed profile-based model of the community's social network, a human activity tracking mechanism, as it was proposed in other work (Wojek et al., 2006;Danninger et al., 2005), would be used to assess communication practices of the community in a closed (laboratory-like) environment. Besides, the development of the community's knowledge model, e.g. an ontology as was proposed in (Giménez-Lugo et al., 2005), would allow us to improve the recommender function of the system and extend its potential applicability to the domain of organizational management. ...
This paper describes a system developed to help people explore local communities by providing navigation services in social spaces created by the community members via communication and knowledge sharing. The proposed system utilizes data of a community's social network to reconstruct the social space, which is otherwise not physically perceptible but imaginary, experiential, yet learnable. The social space is modeled with an agent network, where each agent stands for a member of the community and has knowledge about expertise and personal characteristics of some other members. An agent can gather information, using its social "connections", to find community members most suitable to communicate to in a specific situation defined by the system's user. The system then deploys its multimodal interface, which "maps" the social space onto a representation of the relevant physical space, to locate the potential interlocutors and advise the user on an efficient communication strategy for the given community. Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables.
... From the framework point of view, we were evaluating cooperative scenario, using real data and simulated data. In our use-case example, we consider a connector scenario proposed and exploited in (Danninger et al., 2005). The connector service is responsible for detecting acceptable interruptions (phone call, SMS, targeted audio …) of a particular person in the smart room. ...
... In our use-case example, we consider a connector scenario proposed and exploited in (Danninger et al., 2005). The connector service is responsible for detecting acceptable interruptions (phone call, SMS, targeted audio …) of a particular person in the smart room. ...
In this work, we introduced framework for visual analysis of user behaviour in ambient intelligence environment. The framework consists of five tasks that are performed during evaluation of the applications, depending on the use case. These tasks are divided into two groups. Testing of detection mechanism accuracy task and user scenario creation and editing task are tasks that belong to first group of tasks that focus on preparation of data for tasks in second group. Second group tasks focuses on visual analysis of user behaviour either in evaluation of single user scenarios task or in evaluation of cooperative scenarios task. The framework tasks are executed using two tools, SitCom and USEd. These tools have been exercised by many developers over the course of several years. The tooling framework is currently used by more than ten sites across Europe and it has been part of several technology demonstrations. To support the development within the Reference Architecture Model, we have implemented SitCom framework an extensible Java toolkit to help in all phases of the development of the non-trivial life-cycle of context-aware services. We
... With respect to the meeting resources, once a meeting starts, the context of the meeting such as the room and equipment can be regulated (e.g. by closing curtains, starting projectors, etc.) -see Oh et al. [36] for more examples. An assistant could also alert participants when someone is calling them [11], or provide background information about other participants. A final category of meeting assistants can aid specific meeting roles. ...
This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants, and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all. This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants, and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all.
... A number of context-aware services and frameworks have been proposed over the years [6,19,16] that incorporate users' location and availability, and awareness information while establishing communications between them. For example, the connector service in [6] aims at establishing communication between two users at the most appropriate time, using the most appropriate endpoints, and takes factors such as physical location, social relations and current state of the users into account [6]. ...
... A number of context-aware services and frameworks have been proposed over the years [6,19,16] that incorporate users' location and availability, and awareness information while establishing communications between them. For example, the connector service in [6] aims at establishing communication between two users at the most appropriate time, using the most appropriate endpoints, and takes factors such as physical location, social relations and current state of the users into account [6]. Our previous work in this area [12] discussed a Web browser-based dialog system that facilitated user communications in response to events in the enterprise workflow so as to improve and accelerate decision-making. ...
... A number of context-aware services and frameworks have been proposed over the years [6,19,16] that incorporate users' location and availability, and awareness information while establishing communications between them. For example, the connector service in [6] aims at establishing communication between two users at the most appropriate time, using the most appropriate endpoints, and takes factors such as physical location, social relations and current state of the users into account [6]. Our previous work in this area [12] discussed a Web browser-based dialog system that facilitated user communications in response to events in the enterprise workflow so as to improve and accelerate decision-making. ...
In modern enterprises, workflows are essential to automating business processes. During their execution, workflows need to interact with users using a mechanism called dialogs to deliver information and collect input that is required for further decision-making in the workflows. Information delivery and input collection by enterprise workflows is often a time-sensitive matter. Thus, dialogs have to be communicated to users in a timely fashion, which necessitates sending dialogs to user communication endpoints that permit the recipients to quickly, effectively, and conveniently view the information and provide the requested feedback. The proliferation of communication devices and clients among enterprise users implies that the content and rendering of dialogs has to be tailored to a large number of endpoints and preferably by middleware. This customization poses several challenges to developing and maintaining a manageable, extensible, and flexible middleware mechanism for synthesizing dialogs from specific decision points in enterprise workflows.In this paper, we first describe the challenges associated with context-sensitive dialog synthesis. We discuss how we applied templatized model transformation techniques to automatically synthesize dialogs in enterprise workflows. We show how our templatized transformation approach supports the evolution of communication endpoints and system requirements with a minimum of downtime and invasive design changes. We demonstrate our approach in the context of a representative enterprise case study.
... In order to describe the complex behavior of the Connector Service , we consider a sample scenario described in detail in [20]. In this scenario a meeting is scheduled in a CHIL smart room, where most of the meeting participants are already present in the meeting room. ...
In this paper we describe an agent-based infrastructure for multi- modal perceptual systems which aims at developing and realiz- ing computer services that are delivered to humans in an implicit and unobtrusive way. The framework presented here supports the implementation of human-centric context-aware applications providing non-obtrusive assistance to participants in events such as meetings, lectures, conferences and presentations taking place in indoor "smart spaces". We emphasize on the design and im- plementation of an agent-based framework that supports "plug- gable" service logic in the sense that the service developer can concentrate on coding the service logic independently of the un- derlying middleware. Furthermore, we give an example of the architecture's ability to support the cooperation of multiple ser- vices in a meeting scenario using an intelligent connector service and a semantic web oriented travel service.
... For example, a system may serve as facilitator, organizing the structure of the brainstorm, or it may act as inspirator by displaying inspirational pictures about the discussion. It may act as 'note taker' supporting the participants in making references to earlier discussed materials (Van Gelder, Van Peer, & Aliakseyeu, 2005), or it could be a social worker supporting equal participation and group interaction (Van Turnhout, Malchanau, Disaro & Markopoulos 2002;Kulyk, Wang, & Terken, 2005;Danninger et al., 2005). What an agent may do with the information about whom is talking to whom strongly depends on the role of the application in the meeting. ...
... The meeting scenario has received notable scholarly attention. There are many ideas for possible support (see for example: Danninger et al., 2005), there is technology that helps understand who is talking to whom (Stiefelhagen, 2002) and some first attempts to infer who is talking to whom (Jovanović, 2007). However, the scenario shows that bringing those bits together will be far from trivial. ...
... First, we connect to developments in systems engineering where perceptive components are being developed to sense the presence, proximity, location, orientation, and gestures of people (for example. Danninger et al., 2005). Second, these cues can be sensed independent of the speech recognition. ...
PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus, prof.dr.ir. C.J. van Duijn, voor een commissie aangewezen door het College voor Promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op donderdag 1 november 2007 om 16.00 uur door Koen Gerardus van Turnhout geboren te Tilburg
... The Connector Service stores all pending connections and finds a suitable point of time for these connections to take place. In order to describe the complex behavior of the Connector Service, we consider a sample scenario described in detail in [14]. In this scenario a meeting is scheduled in a CHIL smart room, where most of the meeting participants are already present in the meeting room. ...
... Finally Jeff is informed again by his Personal Agent that his message has been delivered to all meeting participants. Please note that the scenario described in [14] covers further functionality of the Connector Service and involves additional devices and agents. A detailed illustration of the complete scenario would be beyond the scope of this paper. ...
A major challenge of Ambient Intelligence lies in building middleware that can ease service implementation through allowing
the application developer to emphasize only the service logic. In this paper we describe the architecture of an Ambient Intelligence
system established in the scope of the European research project CHIL (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop). CHIL aims
at developing and realizing computer services that are delivered to humans in an implicit and unobtrusive way. The framework
presented here supports the implementation of human-centric context-aware applications. This includes the presentation of
the sensors used in CHIL spaces, the mechanisms employed for controlling sensors and actuating devices, as well as the perceptual
components and the middleware approach for combining them in the scope of applications. Special focus lies on the design and
implementation of an agent based framework that supports “pluggable” service logic in the sense that the service developer
can concentrate on coding the service logic independently of the underlying middleware. Following the description of the framework,
we elaborate on how it has been used to support two prototype context-aware human centric and non-obtrusive services.
